Alex, an outwardly genial 66-year-old wearing a ballcap emblazoned with the “M” of Morgantown High School, was reclining on an exam table, politely considering every medical query tossed his way.
“So, what you brings you in today?” Ashlee Cheng asked. “We heard you might be feeling a little confused or disoriented, maybe?”
“Well, my wife and daughter said I was talking out of sorts,” he began.
He even tried to joke a little.
“They said I wasn’t making any sense – but they say that all the time, anyway.”
As it turns out, it was pretty concerning.
He had been growing more and more forgetful over the past several weeks, his wife and daughter reported.
Before, he’d have the occasional cognitive lapse of a person approaching his seventh decade, but now things were getting more pronounced, more profound.
He was increasingly nervous and agitated.
And – totally out of character for him – he was lashing out in anger, as he was constantly flummoxed by routine tasks he used to perform without even thinking about it.
Was Alex spiraling into a level of dementia or full-on Alzheimer’s?
Was it the onset of a stroke?
Did he have a brain tumor?
It was up to Ashlee and her team to sort it all out, for a proper diagnosis and a treatment that could get Alex programmed back to his old self.
Workups were ordered – and the medical march began.
Case study
For the record, the above exchange Thursday morning didn’t occur in a hospital or other medical facility in town.
In was in Room 166 at Morgantown High.
And while Ashlee is a real live Morgantown High junior, “Alex,” technically, is not real-life.
Except, well, technically, he is.
Alex is actually ALEX, an artificial-intelligence mannequin who is the star of MedEd, a program designed to get high school students thinking early about careers in healthcare.
MedEd is a partnership between WVU Medicine, Monongalia County Schools and the Education Alliance.
It’s a two-year program that puts students into immediate jobs as an ambulatory care assistant or sterile processing technician, the person who makes sure medical instruments used in surgeries and other procedures are absolutely clean and infection-free.
Ashlee, who wants to be a pharmacist, is in the first cohort of students in the program launched last year.
Along with MHS, the program is open to students from University High and the Monongalia County Technical Education Center.
Elliot Henry, Ashlee’s classmate in the program and also a Morgantown High student, likes the WVU connection, as he wouldn’t mind staying home to launch a career as a radiologist.
“It’s a great recruiting tool,” he said, as he worked through the patient narrative and created scans and reports of the above scenario.
“It’s just a great opportunity for anyone thinking about a career in the field.”
Contagious classes
It didn’t take long to catch on, said Elissa Miller, a vice principal at MHS.
“We’ve already got a wait-list for next year,” she said, with 84 applicants from the three schools.
She likes the diversity of the program and the adaptability of ALEX, she said, who can undergo electrocardiograms or be placed on a ventilator.
The AI device isn’t just a 66-year-old man.
ALEX could also be a 6-year-old girl, or a full roster of patients presenting with a variety of ills and concerns – and age-appropriate responses for the scenario.
He can get verbally combative – and he can even experience a grave medical emergency, said Kristen McCain, a WVU registered nurse and a chief instructor in the program.
“We can make him code,” she said, with a little laugh.
“But we haven’t killed him. Not yet.”
Instead, ALEX lives – for training and for finding the pulse of a career.
McCain knows all about that prognosis. She began her professional life as accountant after college, but she soon found out what she wanted to do was save lives – not cost ledgers.
She enrolled in nursing school in her late 20s.
Like ALEX, McCain couldn’t help but assume an identity that wasn’t who she truly was.
“I felt like an old lady,” she said.
